Mother on my mind

Foreword

I started writing this in December 2022 - around the anniversary of my mother's death. Not the day itself, but the day of her memorial service. For the first time in years I hadn't thought about her on the day. I was simply too exhausted from what had led up to the day before. It was what happened three day's later that put mother on my mind.

That was probably the first time since 1999 that the day hasn't jumped up and bitten me. So to speak. Grief is something that the world has discussed at length and at great depth, particularly in the last four years. Each time someone in my friendship circle (real and virtual) suffers a bereavement (there's no other way to say it), I am struck by how grief is a lifelong journey for the living. It starts, each time, as loud and raw. It dissipates and you think it disappears, but it doesn't. It just goes dormant until something - completely unexpected - happens that re-irritates the old wound. At times, more loudly than at others.

In March 2023 I came back with the intention of finishing it: my mother's (and father's) birthday month. It's why she (and they) have been on my mind again. Grief is a journey that continues with lessons - like this - almost every day.

It's serendipitous, perhaps, that @ericvancewalton's theme for this week's Memoir Monday is Mother. This post will take a somewhat different trajectory than originally planned although, in the writing, I may circle back to the original thinking. We shall see.

Ursula Muriel Stockford

My mother was, and was not, a product of her time.

She was born in the late 1920s: one of four daughters; her father was an upholsterer at the Morris factory in Oxford. Shortly before the war, he was killed in a shooting accident in a rifle range. When war broke out, vehicle manufacture gave way to munitions. It was an inordinately difficult time because not only did she lose her father, but all four siblings contracted diphtheria and the youngest died.

So, my mother grew up as the daughter of a single, working mother. Granny got a job in the Morris factory and, somehow, they made ends meet.

Needless to say, a life of leisure was not what lay ahead for her and she went nursing, training at the famous St Barts. I remember her saying she'd have liked to study medicine and in a weird twist of fate, did have a tangential role to play in medicine.

Africa and marriage

My mother had to give up nursing: reluctantly. She suffered from really bad bunions. Nursing was is hard physical work - mostly on one's feet. Her feet wouldn't allow it and her bunions were so bad that the joints were surgically removed. Consequently, her feet were neither pretty nor coped with wedge, let alone stiletto, heels.

Unusually, she embarked on a second career, following a secretarial course in shorthand and typing and into colonial service. This is how she ended up in Kampala, meeting and marrying my Dad.

On colonial service, she was secretary to the medical superintendent of the hospital in Kampala, Uganda. In addition to being an administrator, Alec (I think that was his name - they corresponded for years after they both left Uganda) - was an academic. He researched, among other things, tuberculosis of the spine and she typed up his notes papers for publication.

A role model

In many respects, it's clear my mother was not a product of her time: she married in her thirties and despite my father's pleas, when he had a job that didn't need a second income, needed to work. Being a mother was one thing, but being a housewife home executive was the epitome of boredom for her.

She ended her working life well into her 60s - retiring as the Buying Officer (a role which now would be head of procurement) for Rhodes University. She left a legacy that outlived her. It jumped up and bit me when, some years after she died and I had occasion to be back there on business: I was regaled with stories from executive staff who remembered her. Including that, when she did retire, two people - and computers - were needed to do her job.

In addition to working full time, she'd come home each evening and cook dinner. She wasn't one for take-outs or prepared meals. She enjoyed cooking and I think I have inherited that from her - and her bossiness independence.

Working and carving out a career were never in question. There was never any pressure to find a partner and marry. However, when I did marry the first time, she was aggrieved that we eloped and had robbed her of a wedding, and which she never said to me, but laid on my father.

Clearly, I was a disappointment.

Not friends

It took me a long, long time to acknowledge to anyone other than myself, that my mother and I were not friends. I'm told that that can change in adulthood. It did not for me. Truth be told, we spent very little time together, and when we did, it revolved around either the family or her commands.

I use that word deliberately. She always got her own way: either overtly or covertly. She was a master manipulator. The extent to which she manipulated only became clear to me after she had died. I coped by retreating into myself and then choosing firstly to go to boarding school, and then into residence at university before fleeing the coop to work in Johannesburg.

It's no wonder she didn't know the real Fiona. More to the point, she neither tried to find out, and when I tried, didn't listen. One seminal conversation reveals all. It was my first - or second - Christmas in Johannesburg. It doesn't really matter because I had carved out a life for myself and was happy. In telephone conversations - and a couple of visits back home for milestone events - had told her about my life, my friends, etc. That particular conversation:

Happy Christmas, Fi.

Thank you, Mum, same to you!

What are you doing for Christmas?

Oh, I'm going to so-and-so, and then on to these people, and then for New Year I'll be staying with...

Oh good, I had visions of your being alone in your flat with a boiled egg for lunch.

W T A F ???

She had heard nothing that I had said to her in the previous 12 to 24 months.

I gave up. After that, I never bothered to tell. She certainly never asked.

She was my mother and I loved her

She was the only mother I knew, and with all her flaws, I loved her. When I was a child, and ill, I'd crawl into her lap for comfort. And it was. Comforting. I was very happy to have been carted home from university with a bad bout of flu and to see her at my bedside after a car accident that almost paralysed me.

My father worshipped the ground she walked on, even though - I know from one conversation when my first husband and I split up - it was not reciprocated. Another lesson for me, and one I took to heart - and into my second marriage.

I do not understand women who are friends with their mothers. I cannot envy them because I cannot envy something I never had. That said, I see that it's special and something to treasure. I respect that.

I discovered, when my mother died, that my world shifted in a way I had never imagined possible.

Until next time
Fiona
The Sandbag House
McGregor, South Africa

Photo: Selma
Post script

If this post might seem familiar, it's because I'm still re-vamping old recipes. As I do this, I am adding them in a file format that you can download and print. If you download recipes, buy me a coffee. Or better yet, a glass of wine....?

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